Science buried in bureaucracy and corruption: Office of Research Integrity director quits in disgust

Bureaucrats have not only taken over much of the science world, but even the parts of the bureaucracy designed to hunt out corruption in science are incapacitated with bureaucracy-at-its-worst too. This is second order corruption — even the checks and balances on corruption are corrupted.

As James Delingpole points out: Science is rife with corruption, incompetence, dishonesty and fabrication–and now, thanks to a frank resignation letter by the US’s top scientific misconduct official we have a better idea why.

One in 50 scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once. It’s not just about fraud, it’s about bias, and statistical sloppiness. Up to 30% admitted other questionable research practices. When asked about their colleagues, 14% said other scientists falsified results, and 70% used other questionable research practices (Fanelli 2009). In the modern electronic science world, not only are many results not replicated, but the raw data itself is not even available for checking most of the time. Research shows that scientists who withhold data are more likely to have published errors (see below). Half of the papers in high-end journals contained some statistical error (Wicherts 2011).

What we’re seeing here is how even government funded checks on government funded science don’t work. Without free market competition and private funding, the layers of corruption and perverse incentives just build on the previous layers rather than neutralize them.

In this corrupt climate the need for independent checks is even more important

The director of the U.S. government office that monitors scientific misconduct in biomedical research has resigned after 2 years out of frustration with the “remarkably dysfunctional” federal bureaucracy. David Wright, director of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), writes in a scathing resignation letter obtained by Science Insider that the huge amount of time he spent trying to get things done made much of his time at ORI “the very worst job I have ever had.”

“The rest of my role as ORI Director has been the very worst job I have ever had and it occupies up to 65% of my time. That part of the job is spent navigating the remarkably dysfunctional HHS bureaucracy to secure resources and, yes, get permission for ORI to serve the research community. I knew coming into this job about the bureaucratic limitations of the federal government, but I had no idea how stifling it would be. What I was able to do in a day or two as an academic administrator takes weeks or months in the federal government, our precinct of which is OASH.

On one occasion, I was invited to give a talk on research integrity and misconduct to a large group of AAAS fellows. I needed to spend $35 to convert some old cassette tapes to CDs for use in the presentation. The immediate office denied my request after a couple of days of noodling. A university did the conversion for me in twenty minutes, and refused payment when I told them it was for an educational purpose.

Wright describes OASH (Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health) as “secretive, autocratic and unaccountable”.

Third, there is the nature of the federal bureaucracy itself. The sociologist Max Weber observed in the early 20th century that while bureaucracy is in some instances an optimal organizational mode for a rationalized, industrial society, it has drawbacks. One is that public bureaucracies quit being about serving the public and focus instead on perpetuating themselves. This is exactly my experience with OASH. We spend exorbitant amounts of time in meetings and in generating repetitive and often meaningless data and reports to make our precinct of the bureaucracy look productive. None of this renders the slightest bit of assistance to ORI in handling allegations of misconduct or in promoting the responsible conduct of research. Instead, it sucks away time and resources that we might better use to meet our mission. Since I’ve been here I’ve been advised by my superiors that I had “to make my bosses look good.” I’ve been admonished: “Dave, you are a visionary leader but what we need here are team players.” Recently, I was advised that if I wanted to be happy in government service, I had to “lower my expectations.” The one thing no one in OASH leadership has said to me in two years is ‘how can we help ORI better serve the research community?’ Not once.

I’m offended as an American taxpayer that the federal bureaucracy—at least the part I’ve labored in—is so profoundly dysfunctional.

Hidden Data

Data-sharing is a basic requirement of science, yet only 40% of the top journals even require the raw data to be shared as a condition of publication and of papers published in a journal with some kind of data sharing policy, less than half complied with the policy. [Scientific American] Only 10% of papers had their full primary data sets available upon publication. (Alsheikh–Ali, 2011) A different study claimed things are improving, but still only found 35% of gene expression articles with raw data available by 2009. (Piwowar, 2011)

In psychology, one analysis found the utterly predictable and obvious implication. Scientists who are reluctant to share data are more likely to be hiding evidence that contradicts their conclusions and also more likely to have published errors (Wicherts et al 2011)

In the headline.” Bureaucracy” not “bureucracy”. [Thanks! No spell checker on the titles, don't know how we missed that.]

Competition does not necessarily ensure high ethical standards, c. the Pharmaceutical Industry. In fact, in this case, governments have made a cash cow out of inspection regimes that levy eye-watering fines on any company where malpractice is discovered. If similar standards were imposed on departments producing climatology, a fundamental re-think of climate science practice would take place as substantial sums of tax payers money were clawed back by government auditors. Let’s not go even near how the IPCC would continue to operate.

For some years, in the dim distant past, I worked in local government, world of almost incestuous bureaucracy. Once, I had the good fortune to meet a recreation officer from the USA, I won’t mention his name.
At the time, I was to present a paper at a seminar on the Formulation Of Policy in Local Government.
The conclusion of my presentation was a quote from this most eloquent individual, ” An effective policy screed makes the difference between a service that enriches, and a bureaucracy that encumbers”
Unfortunately, I think we have entered the era of,” The Bureaucracy That Encumbers”.

Strange that Tony Abbott is trying to reduce legislation while the ALP/Green coalition wants to increase it. When Christine Milne or Sarah Hanson-Young have enough knowledge of the world to teach me how to live I will vote Green. It is unlikely that this body will last the centuries that task entails.

Earl, the western world has been in that era at least since the end of WWII. It’s nothing new, it’s just become ever more apparent as Government as grown, which it will continue to do as long as feckless voters keep crying out for ever more government control (and benefits).

“One is that public bureaucracies quit being about serving the public and focus instead on perpetuating themselves”.

I came across a good example in Mann’s book, where ideas get perpetuated even when they are wrong, in ‘the hockey stick and the climate wars’. He talks about Elrich’s and Club of rome’s failed doomsday predictions in the 60s and 70s, as being vindicated, with the ‘last laugh’ etc in Rio in 1992 because a bunch of scientists in 1992 signed a similar doomsday statement. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether something comes true, or is true, it only matters whether or not someone else whom you respect, also says it, even years later. Peer review, in place of failed prediction. Pretty pathetic really. Why is this guy an eminent scientist?

if i remember correctly, santer come up with some bogus excuse as to why the time period had to be cherry picked that way, but of course it was just a ruse like everything else these guys come up with to deflect criticism.

Ayn Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged” warns of the next step down the path to ruin – government science institutions attempting to steal and appropriate the intellectual achievements of others, to try to bolster their own sagging reputations

Nah much better to be quiet so that when the proverbial hits the fan you can then pipe up and say “I told you so”,no-one will remember you saying anything so they will accept what you said on face value.

I think what you are talking about is institutional science. Public service science, an oxymoron. The golden age of independent scientists is gone. Occasionally you get someone but outside incredibly innovative computer companies like IBM, Microsoft and Google, public service scientists learn to obey. What else can they do? With families, mortgages, school fees, social pressure. Then in so many ways, the greatest scientists in history were nut cases, social misfits. You can only thank providence they cared nothing for politics and you can hope that continues if we are blessed with more or maybe it is in the character? Global Warming is a case of something which is 99% politics, a demonstration of the corruption of science from the top down. Everyone has their price and at the top, the stakes are high.

Physics on the building still at Melbourne University was called Natural Philosophy. Scientists should be in essence, Natural Philosophers.

For real scientists, as Galileo said “I believe that good philosophers fly alone, like eagles and not in flocks like starlings. It is true that because eagles are rare birds they are little seen and less heard, while birds that fly like starlings fill the sky with shrieks and cries, and wherever they settle befoul the earth beneath them.”

We are talking about Climate Science, another dismal science invented for a purpose and perpetuated by economists, politicians, leftists for their own reasons, but one which has taught us nothing. Even tomorrow’s weather forecast is probably wrong.

Why do we have to assume the golden age of independent science is over. Craig Venter took on government science with the human genome project and beat them. Can we change the paradigm that government funded science is the only kind there is?

Can we establish a new era of philanthropy…?

Private donors are still giving money, but now it’s wrapped into academic institutes which simultaneously get most of their funding from government pools. They are quasi-government organizations.

There must be a better way. We need institutes which are judged solely on their ability to make predictions that prove accurate. At the moment, if the government throws money at a new group, it gets a title and a logo, and fawning press — the scientific kudos is entirely bought. Not earned.

This is a larger topic. None of the companies I mentioned are government and there are so many others. Many of the bright creative skilled people drift into the exciting creative world of IT and communications and entertainment of one sort of another. Fundamental science is being neglected. For now, it suffices to talk about institutions and how they fail and how our best and most enthusiastic young scientists become department heads looking for funding when they should be chasing their dreams. The Greening of NASA never ceases to amaze.

Philanthropy, even investment in science in Australia? Only in medicine.

There may be significant progress away from government funded science. Article from the New York Times a week and a half ago for your consideration. I normally hate linking to the NYT, but this one is pretty good:

We also have the privately funded newSpace companies here in the US that are busily putting together new ways to get people into space now that the government monopoly on manned space flight has finally been broken. We are only a generation late in doing so. Space Frontier Foudnation is as good a place to start as anywhere else:

Things are changing quickly, and privately run operations like your blog, Anthony’s and others demonstrate that hundreds of billions spent by governments on AGW aren’t carrying the day any more. Cheers -

—–REPLY: Thanks for that agimarc. This is just the kind of information I like to see. Cheers – jo

What about payment in arrears? Real world has to work and complete the job to customer’s satisfaction first! Therefore if your results of your science dont stack up to your original contract claims, you know you might not get paid! Would certainly sharpen the thoughts and process of the science team to make they do get it right? And the very good teams float to the top, and would get good scientist who know their stuff.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, “Who will guard the guards themselves?” or “Who watches the watchmen?” seems to be an ever present predicament of democratic based governments, but I believe is the very mechanism to correct and realign any such deviations into governmental corruption, as long as the question continues to be asked.

Yes to add to Jefferson’s constant reminder of the people being vigilant this also applies to self education, but in socialist viewpoints this is undesirable so we see the constant dumbing down of future generations.
I point this out to young people every opportunity I get and try to instill a healthy skepticism of anyone they vote into power, while they still have a vote.

A big chance to do just that when the sandgropers go to the ballot box next weekend. The perfect result would be six Coalition but a satisfactory one would be four Coalition, one ALP and (gagging) one Green.

Its not surprising really is it? An American organisation for the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) dedicated to truth and verification of other scientific bodies and organisations, is itself corrupted by bureaucracy and red tape! We know this from a reliable source-a whistle blower who just happens to be the director (now resigned) of the ORI. Sounds like a brave man to me. I hope that his career can survive his action. He is to be commended. But will anyone in U.S. government take notice one wonders. I am reminded of our new government in Australia where Prime Minister Tony Abbot has pledged to remove bureaucracies and red tape in government and give us openness and transparency in place. We have a big battle in Australia to achieve truth in science and the science of climate change in particular.
GEOFF W. SYDNEY

We have sloppy science, including sloppy statistical methods, in the climate area. We have much slicker propaganda to deal with in the associated political one, and it can make good use of the sloppy science. One example is the widespread use of some variant of the ’97% of climate scientists’ agree about X, where X is something explicitly awful or catastrophic, or where X is something less alarming by itself but by innuendo or juxtaposition, the support for something along alarming lines is implied. I have more details here: http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/occams-broom-and-stink-of-97-of-climate.html

This whole U.W.A. and the Lewandowsky corruption of the ethical and moral codes that should protect the public from rogue misrepresentation surrounding Psychology projects, needs its own attention and article by Joanne.

The evidence uncovered by Steve McIntyre of shoddy misrepresentation, manipulation of ethical standards, ignorance of the ethical issues involved and involvement of Lewandowsky where he in effect manipulated the bureaucracy to incorporate his own chosen word structure into official replies in the name of that University, to those who had complained about the quality, biased selection of material, multiple and questionable survey methods, selective distribution, and to cap that off he ensured replies including words that he could later claim to have been cleared by their non investigation.

I encourage everyone to read the very even handed report that Steve has posted on his own comprehensive findings at climateaudit at the link above provided by Kevin.

This academic and ethical malfeasance needs airing at the highest review level of academia as well as inclusion in a wider government inquiry to clear the fetid stench surrounding the whole academic handling of ethical issues and the science of climate. Absolutely disgusting that this should happen so blatantly and should not be allowed to happen in the future.

The director of the U.S. government office that monitors scientific misconduct in biomedical research

Yes, but who monitors the monitors? The purpose of the agencies of the government does not seem to check on unethical behavior or flat out fraud, but to maximize revenue for the government. So if an unethical or fraudulent act enhances revenue, it is either hidden or enhanced (See Holdren).

C. Northcote Parkinson, in the introduction to his 1957 book, “Parkinson’s Law (And Other Studies in Administration)” wrote in his introduction of the immediate problem, of making people more generally aware of a dysfunctional bureaucracy:

“To the very young, to schoolteachers, as also to those who compile textbooks, about constitutional history, politics, and current affairs, the world is a more or less rational place. They visualize the election of representatives, freely chosen from among those the people trust. They picture the process by which the wisest and best of these become ministers of state. They imagine how captains of industry, freely elected by shareholders, choose for managerial responsibility those who have proved their ability in a humbler role. Books exist in which assumptions such as these are boldly stated or tacitly implied. To those, on the other hand, with any experience of affairs, these assumptions are merely ludicrous. Solemn conclaves of the wise and good are mere figments of the teacher’s mind. It is salutary, therefore, if an occasional warning is uttered on this subject. Heaven forbid that students should cease to read books on the science of public or business administration–provided only that these works are classified as fiction. Placed between the novels of Rider Haggard and H.G. Wells, intermingled with volumes about ape men and space ships, these textbooks could harm no one. Placed elsewhere, among works of reference, they can do more damage than might at first seem possible.”

In hindsight, the world should have listened to Parkinson, and taken him seriously (though his book was meant to be funny, too–and was, to the ever-lazy, ever-distracted public). It is already too late to do so now, to avoid the damage our “leaders” are busily doing in the name of runaway climate change (and in wider fields as well, as I have tried to inform in recent years).

Today, the world is full of children, on the brink of disastrous “accident” that adults could have avoided.

Public sector bureaucrats will never solve a problem. They will never solve a problem because their job is the problem. No problem, no job. In fact they have the twin incentives of prestige and resources to make the problem worse (or at least seem worse) so that they can become more “important” and better paid.

Public sector bureaucrats can only excel at tasks. Tasks are ongoing actions or processes that are required to perform a function. For example I have had two recent experiences with the Land Titles office and found that the process was clear, well understood and executed in a very timely and professional manner. The important thing is to restrict public sector bureaucrats to tasks and leave problems to the private sector that will only spend resources on the problems that matter.

What I’m really concerned about with the climate change nonsense is that one of the warmist catastrophists will persuade someone like Obama to start carrying out massive “climate enviro-engineering” and, through ignorance, actually CAUSE a REAL climate catastrophe to replace the current imaginary one.

It is NEARLY ALWAYS the dysfunctional bureaucracy that creates most of the world’s problems, and Obama and his lot are about as dysfunctional as they come!!

Yes there’s more money in claiming carbon dioxide insulates than in trying to use it to do so.

All the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a net cooling effect of less than 0.1 degree. There is absolutely no way in which valid physics can be used to prove it warms Earth’s surface.

This cooling is for the same reason that water vapour also has a net cooling effect, as research into temperature-precipitation correlation confirms.

Water gas in between double glazed windows reduces the insulating effect, just as it and carbon dioxide do in the troposphere. If you think I’m wrong, go and make a fortune selling double glazed windows filled with carbon dioxide that will supposedly trap heat. Funny that nobody seems to be doing this

Then again, maybe someone will read my suggestion and start a business conning people to pay for carbon dioxide double glazing. After all, there are plenty of conmen already conning governments and the public into burying their heads in the carbon dioxide hoax.

“Science buried in bureaucracy and corruption:”
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Of course, all is forgiven if they’re ‘saving the planet’!!
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Observers of Professor Stephan Lewandowsky’s (et al) shenanigans will have noted a linear correlation between corruption and ‘noble cause’ of exactly 1 (+/-0)!

“Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?”

That question has been around so long it was originally posed in Latin.

I’m surprised that anyone has the integrity to resign over the corruption. But now we must ask that question yet again,

Who will watch the watchers?

and be serious about it. The Office of Research Integrity is the watchdog over the scientific method’s built in requirement for self policing through questioning and testing every hypothesis. And it can’t do its job.

Oops, my mistake again. We can’t be serious about ending the fraud, can we? No! Of course not. It would put too many solar panel and windmill salesmen out of a job.

Well, kidding aside. I still think the answer is to end or drastically curtail public funding of research. I’d like to see it ended myself. We might make progress at a slower pace but it would be more likely to be real progress instead of just a change from one fad du jour to the next.

If private money or volunteer funding is used, fine. But not my tax dollars.

I exhausted my Latin before I even started to type. But I remember that, “Who will watch the watchers?” line from a Heinlein story I read more years ago than I care to count. It’s a question we don’t pay enough attention to.

Is someone actually watching the store or are people able to just walk in and rip off whatever they want?

Had to look it up on the Internet to get the Latin. It included the question mark — I think.

If these goose-steppers and science illiterates really wanted to inter a lot of carbon they’d all resign and go into permaculture. Or they’d start a non-profit and call it “Terrace Australia” with the goal of making every agricultural hill retain water better by way of swales, retaining walls, terraces, ponds and so forth. So that from the sky pretty much every hillside looked a bit similar to those ancient rice paddies in places like Northern Japan or some parts of China.

And then they’d be planting nitrogen fixing trees and the like. Once you get the water to slow down and be retained in the hillsides and you get the nitrogen in the soil the carbon tends to want to go there of its own accord. Where the fixed nitrogen and water goes, the carbon will follow without too much nudging. We really get an idea of the malevolent nature of the oligarchs (who control the bureaucrats) when we look at the way that technologies that are never going to work are pushed. Always that particular design of wind power that just won’t work is pushed. Or really stupid ideas like the carbon taxes. Its not just technology to do with this particular problem. The bigshots are all the time pushing technology that is not real practical and it seems they hoard more promising ideas. They push space travel based on a Fritz Lang movie that is never going to be able to develop far and they clutch onto electro-gravitics that had a lot of promise even way back in the 50′s. They push idiotic ideas like the big bang (a young universe creation myth if ever there was one) and dump on growing earth theory. Another example is the stupidity of the Einstein corpus which we can now track as a brazen act of media hype that hammered these dopey ideas into the culture by sheer brute force of indoctrination.

When the envirocrazies were taking over the government in the 90′s my supervisor had to fill out an Environmental Impact Declaration for an aluminium casting, he wrote in the available space “Contains no Snow Leopard”, there was no followup. So much bureaucracy, so many public servants, so few brains.

I’m impressed. Five years ago I would have been beaten up, ridiculed and banned for ever challenging Saint Einstein. I think this global warming fraud has lead people to think hard about what other science lies have been pushed upon an oppressed public.

[...] Office of Research Integrity director quits in disgust Bureaucrats have not only taken over much of the science world, but even the parts of the bureaucracy designed to hunt out corruption in science are incapacitated with bureaucracy-at-its-worst too. This is second order corruption — even the checks and balances on corruption are corrupted. [...]